Sweet Doc About a Norwegian “Folk School”

A warm and big-hearted crowdpleaser set against a cold and seemingly inhospitable backdrop, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady‘s Folktales can look to Sundance precedent to safely expect to find a welcoming audience.

Their new documentary is Boys State (or Girls State) with Norwegian dogsledding instead of American civics.

Or perhaps, to look to the filmmakers’ own catalogue, Folktales is a dyslexic Jesus Camp, its young subjects turning to dog instead of God for personal growth.

Either way, Folktales is an easily embraceable coming-of-age documentary that makes up for what it lacks in depth with its surplus of wise, vaguely anthropomorphized canine companions. It’s a film that benefits from being seen with a crowd, not just to experience its lavishly furry and frigid images on the biggest screen possible, but to be part of a communal ritual in which everybody simultaneously coos at and cajoles the featured animals.

Yes. There are humans in Folktales as well.

The movie is set at Pasvik Folk High School in the upper reaches of Norway. The folk high school system was established to educate rural residents, but largely exists today in the form of international magnet schools attracting teenage students between high school and the rest of their lives. Although the school’s principal instantly emphasizes that Pasvik isn’t a “gap year” program, it’s absolutely a gap year, in which kids somewhat disconnect from the hustle and bustle and technology of modern life and attempt to use their lessons in sledding and survival skills to reactivate their Stone Age brains.

The curriculum at these folk schools once heavily integrated Norse folklore and mythology. The documentary uses fleeting reenactments and insufficiently justified framing devices to connect a contemporary story with legends involving Odin and the Norns, the Norse equivalent of the Fates, three figures spinning threads of destiny for humans and gods alike.

Perhaps to mirror the three Norns, Folktales keeps its eye primarily on three affable kids.

Hege is hung up on the approval of peers and still struggling with the recent murder of her father.

Nerdy Bjørn Tore has difficulties finding friends, admitting that people often think he’s annoying.

Romain, who is Dutch, has crippling anxiety, extremely relatable self-doubt and no evident interest in learning about nature. 

All three are adrift in different ways and over the course of the documentary, viewers will discover that what teens need to gain confidence and refine their identities is nothing less than SOME VERY GOOD DOGS.

Pasvik has a huge kennel and an unspecified number of dogs, and over the course of the nine-month program, under the watch of on-camera instructors Iselin and Thor-Atle, the kids will be taught to care for the dogs — who are all VERY GOOD DOGS — learn sledding techniques and take periodic, increasingly unsupervised wilderness retreats accompanied only by their VERY GOOD DOGS and the smallest assortment of tools and provisions.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that, over the course of 106 minutes, Hege and Bjørn Tore and Romain will learn valuable lessons that will shape their personalities forever, though not always in exactly the ways you’ll expect. The documentary isn’t always subtle in its treatment of the journey; if I heard one more story about the Norns and their most important words for humanity, I was prepared to throw lutefisk at the screen — but the arcs are gentle and sweet and the directors don’t try to convince you that one night sleeping in the snow with an axe and a blue-eyed husky will give you all of the resources you need to make it in the world. Even a VERY GOOD HUSKY.

With Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo as director of photography and Tor Edvin Eliassen as cinematographer, Folktales is beautifully shot, alternating between the intimacy of its treatment of the human subjects and dogs — the red-bathed close-ups of dog visages linger long after the closing credits — and the bird’s-eye drone photography you apparently cannot make a documentary without these days. Any time the documentary gets too figurative and dreamy, viewers are treated to the kinetic rush of an amateurishly steered dogsled lumbering or tipping in the snow to snap you back to reality like a plunge into an icy body of water (something else the students do to help build character).

The comfort the subjects obviously feel with Ewing and Grady yields a level of reflection that makes for occasional moments of startling candor — Hege’s story of her father’s death, in particular — but is generally surface-deep, which matches the documentary’s treatment of the school at large. Parallels to the Norns aside, three subjects ends up being limiting. I kept having questions about all the other students flitting through the background, as well as the non-survival, non-puppy aspects of their study. Every once in a while, you hear somebody speaking French or Spanish and it’s tempting to wonder what brings those people to Pasvik rather than other, similar schools.

But then you get a scene of Hege learning to howl with her dogs or Bjørn Tore and Romain bonding or one of the teachers beaming at a pupil’s transformation, and the lack of depth seems more like “simplicity” or “purity,” part of an enjoyable, immersive lesson.